Abstract
In the summer and autumn, which is the primary cropland planting preparation and harvest time, cropland burning is very common in China. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Terra active fire product (MOD14) and GlobeLand30-2010 data are used here to analyze the fire activity of the predominant land cover types. A total of 44,852 scenes of MOD14 images and MOD03 images are used, covering the whole of China from 20 May to 31 October during 2010 to 2014. Agricultural burning is a significant contributor to fire activity in China, and accounts for 60% on average of all the fire activity over the last five years. The spatial and temporal distribution of agricultural burning in seven different geographical regions is analyzed in detail. The experiments showed that the Central and Eastern China regions are the largest contributors to agricultural burning, producing 59%–80% of all the agricultural fires. At the national scale, the number of agricultural fire counts peak in June, which is associated primarily with winter burning of wheat croplands.
Highlights
Biomass burning is an important global emission source [1], and it has significant impacts on air quality, climate change, and human health [2]
We used MOD14 images from 2010 to 2014 to analyze the distribution of fires in the main land cover types in China in accordance with the land cover classes of China that appear in the recently developed GlobeLand30-2010 data, According to GlobeLand30-2010 data classification results, we found that agricultural fires, artificial surface fires, forest fires, and grassland fires contributed to an annual average of 95% of all the fires occurring in China, and that these fires represented the main biological fires that occurred during summers and autumns in China
Agricultural burning was a significant contributor to the fire activity of China in the summer and autumn, accounting for 55%–64% of the total fires
Summary
Biomass burning is an important global emission source [1], and it has significant impacts on air quality, climate change, and human health [2]. It is normal practice that crop straw is burned in fields after harvest, especially in agricultural countries such as the USA, India, and China [5,6,7]. Agricultural residue fires are generally smaller in size, less intense in strength, and shorter in duration than forest and savanna fires [8,9]. It is, difficult to monitor because of the scattered distribution of the crop burning and random burning time. Satellite remote sensing has provided effective approaches to monitor the occurrence and timing of fires over large areas at locations where field data are not available [10]. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard the Terra (1999)
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